Twelfth Cake

Yes, those are marzipan squirrels and flowers.

Revisiting Elinor Fettisplace's Great Cake for Twelfth Night. In addition to actually baking it as one great cake, this time I made a double-batch of the dough (~1/4 the original scale), and finished it with the recommended sugar-rosewater glaze (actually from the marchpane recipe in the same book). 

This time, I used the exact amount of liquid called for in the modern translation (12 oz each of ale and milk for a double-batch), and that was a mistake. The dough was very tough and I could not work it smooth, however much I kneaded it. Especially once I added in the currants, the dough tended to split and spew dried fruit instead of forming a smooth mass. 

The spice flavor remains nice and not over-bearing, with the cinnamon predominating slightly over the nutmeg and ginger. The sugar glaze added a hint of sweetness and a light rose flavor to some of the cake, but the rest still tasted like unsweetened cinnamon-raisin bread. I would like to keep working on this recipe, but I think from here on out I definitely need to increase the liquids, and likely also the sugar content, in order to get something that will be accepted as 'cake.' For what it's worth, the original instructions call for using 'enough barm to make a light cake', so I think I'm on good historic footing to add more ale.

To make it more festive, I decorated the cake with subtleties; I used commercially-prepared almond paste, but did bake and glaze the figures as called for in Lady Fettisplace's marchpane recipe. I cut out the upper squirrel and the four-lobed flowers with cookie cutters, but used a candy molds to make the 3D squirrel at the center front. This went easier than I had feared, but it was good that I made two of them, since both fell apart a bit during the baking. I also found that even a few minutes at 350F was enough to start browning the paste, especially at the thinner points of the shapes, before the centers were cooked through; next time, I should use a cooling oven or else see if the bread-proofing setting is high enough to dry it out.